How can you forgive someone who decided to hurt you?
What does it mean to forgive, and why does it matter?
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
— Lewis B. Smedes.
I don’t know what someone has done to hurt you. But I know that pain hurts: it’s hurting you, and sometimes, it makes you want to hurt someone back. That text, phone call, or argument may have faded in a few days, hours or weeks, but the pain stays. At first you might just feel the anger, but soon that anger turns to suffering. You’ll dwell on what happened, why, and how. How could someone hurt you like that? How could they make the decision to act that way? And how could you have let yourself get hurt like that in the first place? You won’t have the answers. Perhaps you never will.
And that’s okay.
Forgiveness isn’t something you can rush, or something you have to have heard by the other party. It isn’t something you can slap onto an email and mean, it isn’t something you have to wait for an apology to express. Forgiveness is the one action that has to be entirely voluntary, and entirely intentional, and entirely true. You cannot say it and not mean it, you cannot rush it, and you cannot fake it. You must work at it.
Understanding why they hurt you: why forgiveness helps
If the wound is still raw, you might be asking yourself why you should forgive the other person at all. You don’t. But anger festers in you, and not addressing those feelings can lead you to subconsciously place those emotions on others in future relationships and friendships. It’s important not to confusion forgiveness with justifying their actions: that affair still hurt you, that comment still caused you pain, that lie still distressed you.
But forgiveness isn’t about the action: it’s about your pain. You can choose to work through your pain and find the reasons someone acted as they did, and forgive them for the way they made you feel. Maybe they were cowardly. Maybe they were frightened. Maybe they were hurting inside. Maybe they just behaved badly and made a bad decision. There’s rarely an incident where someone plans and intends to hurt you.
People are not villains and heroes: they are just a kaleidoscope of experiences trying to work through the hopes and struggles of their lives. They can behave with ugliness or great beauty, depending on what shards fall on their mirror that day, and what you choose to see. They can be more good than bad, or more bad than good, but everyone is capable of great compassion, and great cruelty.
That’s the reality of getting older: we realise that there aren’t just bullies and friends, or evil people and good people- just a complex collection of humans on a confusing and complex planet. Allow yourself to explore what you know about the person who hurt you: what happened to them? What was their story? What were they thinking? What made them do it? You might not have all the evidence or facts, but it will help you humanise them. And when you deconstruct that sociopathic monster into a fragile, normal human, you can start to forgive them. You can start letting go of your anxieties and pain and see what happened for what it really was: an ordinary person choosing to behave in a way that hurt you.
When the other party isn’t sorry
Not getting that ‘sorry’ from someone you cared about can be hard. Knowing the other person doesn’t feel sorry is even harder. I know: I haven’t got my sorry either. But the person who hurt you doesn’t need to say sorry, ever- because they don’t need to validate your sadness and pain for those to be valid. You know how you feel. You know how they chose to act. And you know the weaknesses, flaws and cowardice behind how they came to process their actions. Are they a very fragile person? A person who would struggle to confront the realities of what they did, or your potential anger at their apology? A person who doesn’t want to deal with the pain they cause? There’s lots of reasons someone might feel regret and not choose to apologise. And none of them are your fault, and none of them make your anger and pain less real. That’s why you have to forgive on your own: and that takes time, empathy, and a lot of strength.
How to help yourself to forgive someone you loved
You can channel your anger constructively: pummel some clay, beat a pillow, write all your angriest emotions out on paper and burn them: do what you need to confront your own pain. What’s made your anger so intense? What about their behaviour is such a betrayal? What do you need to confront about yourself to let go? Perhaps you were insecure about yourself when they cheated on you. Perhaps you struggle with abandonment after a childhood experience. Perhaps you can’t accept that someone you loved could hurt you. Ask yourself the hard questions: work through those feelings.
Often when we are angry, hurt, or distressed, we’re also reliving the previous examples of stress, grief, and betrayal in our own lives. If you really want to forgive someone: you have to start with yourself. You have to forgive yourself for having the feelings that you do, and for being hurt. You have to forgive yourself for not seeing the red flags, and for not sensing that person could hurt you. When you finally see them for what they really are, it is incredibly healing. Perhaps you now see their cowardice, their insecurities, and their phobias. They are probably going to be dealing with the same emotions as you at some point in their lives. In a world where you can be anything: be kind.
Imagine you are holding a balloon, and you realise that the string is cutting your hand. You don’t want to carry the balloon anymore, but you’re worried about what will happen if you let go. Maybe the balloon will burst, or you’ll feel lost. But then you realise that you’re hurting yourself holding on to something that is hurting you far more than finding out what the consequences of life without it might be. So you let go. That’s why forgiveness is hard: it means letting go of the comfort of anger and resentment and allowing ourselves to look forward to new emotions and experiences.
Your anger doesn’t justify your pain. Just as the person who hurt you can’t validate it. Forgiveness comes from you, and it comes from your own kindness, humanity, and empathy. So take a deep breath, go for a long walk, and find the first steps to a place where you can start to love yourself enough to move on.
